Sharpe’s Honour: The Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813

A pair of dark eyes, hard and angry, looked from the Lieutenant’s gilt spurs, up his boots, up the rich, mud-spattered, blue woollen cloak till they met the excited staff officer’s eyes. ‘You’re in my way, Lieutenant.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

The Lieutenant hastily moved his horse to one side. He had ridden hard, making a circuit of difficult country, and was proud of his ride. His mare was restless, matching the rider’s exhilarated mood. ‘General Preston’s compliments, sir, and the enemy is coming your way.’

‘I’ve got picquets on the ridge.’ Sharpe said it ungraciously. ‘I saw the enemy a half-hour since.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sharpe stared at the ridge. The Lieutenant was wondering whether he ought to quietly ride away when suddenly the tall Rifleman looked at him again. ‘Do you speak French?’

The Lieutenant, who was nervous of meeting Major Richard Sharpe for the first time, nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How well?’

The cavalryman smiled. ‘Très bien, Monsieur, je parle …’

‘I didn’t ask for a goddamned demonstration! Answer me.’

The Lieutenant was horrified by the savage reproof. ‘I speak it well, sir.’

Sharpe stared at him. The Lieutenant thought that this was just such a stare that an executioner might give a plump and once-privileged victim. ‘What’s your name, Lieutenant?’

‘Trumper-Jones, sir.’

‘Do you have a white handkerchief?’

This conversation, Trumper-Jones decided, was becoming increasingly odd. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’ Sharpe looked back to the ridge, and to the saddle among the rocks where the road came over the skyline.

This had become, he was thinking, a bastard of a day’s work. The British army was clearing the roads eastward from the Portuguese frontier. They were driving back the French outposts and prising out the French garrisons, making the roads ready for the army’s summer campaign.

And on this day of fitful rain and cold wind five British Battalions had attacked a small French garrison on the River Tormes. Five miles behind the French, on the road that would be their retreat, was this bridge. Sharpe, with half a Battalion and a Company of Riflemen had been sent by a circuitous night march to block the retreat. His task was simple; to stop the French long enough to let the other Battalions come up behind and finish them off. It was as simple as that, yet now, as the afternoon was well advanced, Sharpe’s mood was sour and bitter.

‘Sir?’ Sharpe looked up. The Lieutenant was offering him a folded linen handkerchief. Trumper-Jones smiled nervously. ‘You wanted a handkerchief, sir?’

‘I don’t want to blow my nose, you fool! It’s for the surrender!’ Sharpe scowled and walked two paces away.

Michael Trumper-Jones stared after him. It was true that fifteen hundred French were approaching this small force of less then four hundred men, but nothing that Trumper-Jones had heard of Richard Sharpe had prepared him for this sudden willingness to surrender. Sharpe’s fame, indeed, had reached England, from whence Michael Trumper-Jones had so recently sailed to join the army, and the closer he had come to the battle lines, the more he had heard the name. Sharpe was a soldier’s soldier, a man whose approval was eagerly sought by other men, whose name was used as a touchstone of professional competence, and apparently a man who now contemplated surrender without a fight.

Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones, appalled at the thought, looked surreptitiously at a face made dark by sun and wind. It was a handsome face, marred only by a scar that pulled down Sharpe’s left eye to give him a mocking, knowing expression. Trumper-Jones did not know it, but that scar-pulled expression would disappear with a smile.

What astonished Trumper-Jones most was that Major Richard Sharpe bore no marks of rank, neither sash nor epaulettes; indeed nothing except the big battered cavalry sword at his side indicated that he was an officer. He looked, Trumper-Jones thought, the very image of a man who had taken the first French Eagle captured by the British, who had stormed the breach at Badajoz, and charged with the Germans at Garcia Hernandez. His air of confidence made it hard to believe that he had started his career in the ranks. It made it even harder to believe that he would surrender his outnumbered men without a fight.

‘What are you staring at, Lieutenant?’

‘Nothing, sir.’ Trumper-Jones had thought Sharpe was watching the southern hills.

Sharpe was, but he had become aware of the Lieutenant’s gaze, and he resented it. He hated being pointed out, being watched. He was comfortable these days only with his friends. He was also aware that he had sounded unnecessarily harsh to the young cavalry officer. He looked up at him. ‘We counted three guns. You agree?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Four-pounders?’

‘I think so, sir.’

Sharpe grunted. He watched the crest. He hoped the two questions would make him appear friendlier to the officer, though in truth Sharpe did not feel friendly to any strangers these days. He had been oppressed since Christmas, swinging between violent guilt and savage despair because his wife had died in the snows at the Gateway of God. Unbidden into his mind came the sudden picture of the blood at her throat. He shook his head, as if to drive the picture away. He felt guilty that she had died, he felt guilty that he had been unfaithful to her, he felt guilty that her love had been so badly returned, he felt guilty that he had let his daughter become motherless.

He had become poor through his guilt. His daughter, still not two years old, was growing up with her uncle and aunt, and Sharpe had taken all his savings, that he had stolen from the Spanish government in the first place, and given them to Antonia, his daughter. He had nothing left, except his sword, his rifle, his telescope, and the clothes on his back. He found himself resenting this young staff officer with his expensive horse and gilt scabbard furnishings and new leather boots.

There was a murmur in the ranks behind him. The men had seen the small figures who suddenly appeared on the southern crest. Sharpe turned round. ‘’Talion!’ There was silence. ‘’Talion! ’Shun!’

The men’s boots crashed on the wet rocks. They were in two ranks, stretched across the mouth of the small valley which carried the road northwards.

Sharpe stared at them, knowing their nervousness. These were his men, of his Battalion, and he trusted them, even against this outnumbering enemy. ‘Sergeant Huckfield!’

‘Sir!’

‘Raise the Colours!’

The men, Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones thought, grinned most unfittingly for such a solemn moment, then he saw why. The ‘Colours’ were not the usual flags of a Battalion, instead they were scraps of cloth that had been tied to two stripped birch trunks. The rain made them hang limp and flat, so that from any distance it was impossible to see that the flags were nothing more than two cloaks tricked out with yellow facings torn from the jackets of the soldiers. At the head of the two staffs were wrapped more of the yellow cloth to resemble, at least at a distance, the crowns of England.

Sharpe saw the staff officer’s surprise. ‘Half Battalions don’t carry Colours, Mr Trumper-Jones.’

‘No, sir.’

‘And the French know that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what will they think?’

‘That you have a full Battalion, sir?’

‘Exactly.’ Sharpe looked back to the south, leaving Michael Trumper-Jones curious as to why this deception was a necessary preliminary to surrender. He decided it was best not to ask. Major Sharpe’s face discouraged casual questions.

And no wonder, for Major Richard Sharpe, as he stared at the southern ridge, was thinking that this river valley was a miserable, unfitting, and stupid place to die. He wondered, sometimes, if in death he would meet Teresa again, would see her thin, bright face that had always smiled a welcome; a face that, as her death receded, had lost the detail in his memory. He did not even have a picture of her, and his daughter, growing up in her Spanish family, had no picture of her mother or her father.

The army, Sharpe knew, would march away from Spain one day, and he would march with it, and his daughter would be left to life, just as he had been left orphaned as a small child. Misery begets misery, he thought, and then he remembered the consolation that Antonia’s uncle and aunt were better, more loving parents than he could have been.

A gust of wind slapped rain over the valley, obscuring the view and hissing on the stones of the bridge. Sharpe looked up at the mounted staff officer. ‘What do you see, Lieutenant?’

‘Six horsemen, sir.’

‘They haven’t got cavalry?’

‘Not that we saw, sir.’

‘That’s their infantry officers then. Buggers will be planning our deaths now.’ He smiled sourly. He wished this weather would end, that the sun would warm the land and push the memory of winter far behind him.

Then the skyline, where it was crossed by the road, was suddenly thick with the blue uniforms of the French. Sharpe counted the companies as they marched towards him. Six. They were the vanguard, the men who would be ordered to rush the bridge, but not till the French guns had been fetched into place.

That morning Sharpe had borrowed Captain Peter d’Alembord’s horse and had ridden the French approach route a dozen times. He had put himself into the place of the opposing commander and had argued with himself until he was certain what the enemy would do. Now, as he watched, they were doing it.

The French knew that a large British force was behind them. They dared not leave the road, abandoning their guns to take to the hills, for then they would be meat for the Partisans. They would want to blast away this road-block swiftly, and their tools for the job would be their guns.

A hundred and fifty yards beneath the crest, where the road twisted for the last time towards the valley floor, there was a flat platform of rock that would make an ideal artillery platform. From there the French could plunge their canisters into Sharpe’s two ranks, could twitch them bloody, and when the British were scattered and torn and wounded and dying, the infantry would charge the bridge with their bayonets. From the convenient rock platform the French guns could fire over the heads of their own infantry. The platform was made for the task, so much so that Sharpe had put a working party there this morning and made them clear the space of the boulders that might inconvenience the gunners.

He wanted the French guns there. He had invited the French to put their guns there.

He watched the three gun teams inch their way down the steep road. Infantrymen helped brake the wheels. Lower and lower they came. It was possible, he knew, that the guns might be brought to the flat land across from the bridge, but to stop that he had posted his handful of Riflemen from the South Essex Light Company on the river bank. The French would have seen them there, would fear the spinning accuracy of the bullets, and would, he hoped, choose to place the guns out of the rifles’ range.

They so chose. Sharpe watched with relief as the teams swung onto the platform, as the weapons were unlimbered, and as the ready ammunition was brought forward.

Sharpe turned. ‘Unstop your muzzles!’ The two redcoated ranks pulled the corks from their musket barrels and unwrapped the damp rags from the locks. ‘Present!’

The muskets went into the men’s shoulders. The French would see the movement. The French feared the speed of British musket fire, the well-drilled rhythm of death that had scoured so many battlefields of Spain.

Sharpe turned away from his men. ‘Lieutenant?’

‘Sir?’ Michael Trumper-Jones answered in a squeak. He tried again in a deeper voice. ‘Sir?’

‘Tie your handkerchief to your sabre.’

‘But, sir …’

‘You will obey orders, Lieutenant.’ It was not said so loudly as to reach any ears other than Trumper-Jones’s, but the words were harshly chilling.

‘Yes, sir.’

The six attack companies of the French were two hundred and fifty yards away. They were in column, their bayonets fixed, ready to come forward when the guns had done their work.

Sharpe took the telescope from his haversack, extended the tubes, and looked at the guns. He could see the canisters, the tin cans that spread their balls in a fan of death, being carried to the muzzles of the three guns.

This was the moment when he hated being a Major. He must learn to delegate, to let other men do the dangerous, hard work, yet at this moment, as the French gunners made the last adjustments to the gun trails, he wished he was with the Company of Riflemen that he had been given for this day’s work.

The first canister was pushed into a barrel.

‘Now, Bill!’ Sharpe said it aloud. Michael Trumper-Jones wondered if he was supposed to reply and decided it was best to say nothing.

To the left of the road, from the high rocks that dominated the track, white puffs of smoke appeared. Seconds later came the crack of the rifles. Already three of the gunners were down.

It was a simple ambush. A company of Riflemen hidden close to where the guns would be forced to unlimber. It was a ploy Sharpe had used before; he supposed he would use it again, but it always seemed to work.

The French were never ready for Riflemen. Because they did not use rifles themselves, preferring the smoothbore musket that fired so much quicker, they took no precautions against the green-jacketed men who used cover so skilfully, and who could kill at three or four hundred paces. Half the gunners were down now, the rocks were thick with rifle smoke, and still the cracks sounded and the bullets spun into the gun teams. The Riflemen, changing their positions to aim past the smoke of their previous shots, were shooting the draught horses so the guns could not be moved and killing the gunners so the immobilised guns could not be fired.

The enemy rearguard that was on the road behind the guns was doubled forward. They were formed beneath the rocks and ordered upwards, but the rocks were steep and the Riflemen nimbler than their heavily laden opponents. The French attack did, at least, stop the Riflemen firing at the gunners, and those artillerymen who survived crawled out from the shelter of their limbers to continue the loading.

Sharpe smiled.

There was a man in those hills called William Frederickson, half German, half English, and as fearsome a soldier as any Sharpe knew. He was called Sweet William by his men, perhaps because his eye patch and scarred face were so horrid. Sweet William let the surviving gunners uncover themselves, then he ordered the Riflemen to the right of the road to open fire.

The last gunners dropped. The Riflemen, reacting to Frederickson’s shouts, switched their aim to the mounted officers of the infantry. The enemy, by a few, well-aimed rifle shots, had been denied artillery and thrown into sudden chaos. Now was the time for Sharpe to unleash his other weapon. ‘Lieutenant?’

Michael Trumper-Jones, who was trying to hide the damp white flag that drooped from his sabre tip, looked at Sharpe. ‘Sir?’

‘Go to the enemy, Lieutenant, give them my compliments, and suggest that they lay down their weapons.’

Trumper-Jones stared at the tall, dark-faced Rifleman. ‘That they surrender, sir?’

Sharpe frowned at him. ‘You’re not suggesting that we surrender, are you?’

‘No, sir.’ Trumper-Jones shook his head a little too emphatically. He was wondering how to persuade fifteen hundred Frenchmen to surrender to four hundred wet, disconsolate British infantrymen. ‘Of course not, sir.’

‘Tell them we’ve got a Battalion in reserve here, that there’s six more behind them, that we’ve got cavalry in the hills, that we’ve got guns coming up. Tell them any goddamned lie you like! But give them my compliments and suggest that enough men have died. Tell them they have time to destroy their Colours.’ He looked over the bridge. The French were scrambling up the rocks, yet still enough rifle shots, muffled by the damp air, sounded to tell Sharpe that men died wastefully in the afternoon. ‘Go on, Lieutenant! Tell them they have fifteen minutes or I will attack! Bugler?’

‘Sir?’

‘Sound the Reveille. Keep it sounding till the Lieutenant reaches the enemy.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The French, warned by the bugle, watched the lone horseman ride towards them with his white handkerchief held aloft. Politely, they ordered their own men to cease firing at the elusive Riflemen in the rocks.

The smoke of the fight drifted away in a shower of windblown rain as Trumper-Jones disappeared into a knot of French officers. Sharpe turned round. ‘Stand easy!’

The five companies relaxed. Sharpe looked to the river bank. ‘Sergeant Harper!’

‘Sir!’ A huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, came from the bank. He was one of the Riflemen who, with Sharpe, had been stranded in this Battalion of redcoats as part of the flotsam of war. Although the South Essex wore red and carried the short-range musket, this man, like the other Riflemen of Sharpe’s old Company, still wore the green uniform and carried the rifle. Harper stopped by Sharpe. ‘You think the buggers will give in?’

‘They haven’t got any choice. They know they’re trapped. If they can’t get rid of us within the hour, they’re done for.’

Harper laughed. If any man was a friend of Sharpe’s it was this Sergeant. They had shared every battlefield together in Spain and Portugal, and the only thing that Harper could not share was the guilt that haunted Sharpe since his wife’s death.

Sharpe rubbed his hands against the unseasonal cold. ‘I want some tea, Patrick. You have my permission to make some.’

Harper grinned. ‘Yes, sir.’ He spoke with the raw accent of Ulster.

The tea was still warm in Sharpe’s cupped hands when Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones returned with the French Colonel. Sharpe had already ordered the fake Colours to be lowered and now he went forward to meet his forlorn enemy. He refused to take the man’s sword. The Colonel, who knew he could not take this bridge without his guns, agreed to the terms. He took consolation, he said, in surrendering to a soldier of Major Sharpe’s repute.

Major Sharpe thanked him. He offered him tea.

Two hours later, when General Preston arrived with his five Battalions, puzzled because he had heard no musketry ahead of him, he found fifteen hundred French prisoners, three captured guns, and four wagons of supplies. The French muskets were piled on the roadway. The plunder they had brought from their garrisoned village was in the packs of Sharpe’s men. Not one of the South Essex, nor one of Frederickson’s Riflemen, was even wounded. The French had lost seven men, with another twenty-one wounded.

‘Congratulations, Sharpe!’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Officer after officer offered him congratulations. He shook them off. He explained that the French really had no choice, they could not have broken his position without guns, yet still the congratulations came until, shy with embarrassment, he walked back to the bridge.

He crossed the seething water and found the South Essex’s Quartermaster, a plump officer named Collip who had accompanied the half Battalion on its night-time march.

Sharpe backed Collip into a cleft of the rocks. Sharpe’s face was grim as death. ‘You’re a lucky man, Mr Collip.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Collip looked terrified. He had joined the South Essex only two months before.

‘Tell me why you’re a lucky man, Mr Collip?’

Collip swallowed nervously. ‘There’ll be no punishment, sir?’

‘There never would have been any punishment, Mr Collip.’

‘No, sir?’

‘Because it was my fault. I believed you when you said you could take the baggage off my hands. I was wrong. What are you?’

‘Very sorry, sir.’

In the night Sharpe and his Captains had gone ahead with Frederickson’s Riflemen. He had gone ahead to show them the path they must take, and he had left Collip, with the Lieutenants, to bring the men on. He had gone back and discovered Collip at the edge of a deep ravine that had been crossed with harsh difficulty. Sharpe had led the Riflemen over, climbing down one steep bank, wading an ice-cold stream that was waist deep with the water of this wet spring, then scrambling up the far bank with dripping, freezing clothes.

When he returned for the five companies he had found failure waiting for him.

Mr Collip, Quartermaster, had decided to make the crossing easier for the redcoats. He had made a rope out of musket slings, a great loop that could be endlessly pulled over the chasm, and on the rope he had slung across the ravine all the men’s weapons, packs, canteens, and haversacks. On the last pass the knotted slings had come undone and all the South Essex’s musket ammunition had gone down into the stream.

When the French approached the bridge only Sharpe’s Riflemen had ammunition. The French could have taken the bridge with one volley of musketry because Sharpe had nothing with which to oppose them.

‘Never, Mr Collip, ever, separate a man from his weapons and ammunition. Do you promise me that?’

Collip nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I think you owe me a bottle of something, Mr Collip.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

‘Good day, Mr Collip.’

Sharpe walked away. He smiled suddenly, perhaps because the clouds in the west had parted and there was a sudden shaft of red sunlight that glanced down to the scene of his victory. He looked for Patrick Harper, stood with his old Riflemen, and drank tea with them. ‘A good day’s work, lads.’

Harper laughed. ‘Did you tell the bastards we didn’t have any ammunition?’

‘Always leave a man his pride, Patrick.’ Sharpe laughed. He had not laughed often since Christmas.

But now, with this first fight of the new campaign, he had survived the winter, had made his first victory of the spring, and he looked forward at last to a summer untrammelled by the griefs and tangles of the past. He was a soldier, he was marching to war, and the future looked bright.

CHAPTER TWO

On a day of sunshine, when the martins were busy making their nests in the old masonry of Burgos Castle, Major Pierre Ducos stared down from the ramparts.

He was hatless. The small west wind lifted his black hair as he stared into the castle’s courtyard. He fidgeted with the earpieces of his spectacles, wincing as the curved wire chafed his sore skin.

Six wagons were being dragged over the cobbles. The wagons were huge, lumbering fourgons, each pulled by eight oxen. Tarpaulins covered their loads, tarpaulins roped down and bulging with cargo. The tired oxen were prodded to the far end of the courtyard where the wagons, with much shouting and effort, were parked against the keep’s wall.

The wagons had an escort of cavalrymen who carried bright-bladed lances from which hung red and white pennants.

The garrison of the castle watched the wagons arrive. Above their heads, at the top of the keep, the tricolour of France flapped sullenly in the wind. The sentries stared out across the wide countryside, wondering whether the war would once again lap against this old Spanish fortress that guarded the Great Road from Paris to Madrid.

There was a rattle of hooves in the gateway and Pierre Ducos saw a bright, gleaming carriage come bursting into the courtyard. It was drawn by four white horses that were harnessed to the splinter-bar with silver trace chains. The carriage was driven too fast, but that, Ducos decided, was typical of the carriage’s owner.

She was known in Spain as La Puta Dorada, ‘the Golden Whore’.

Beside the carriage, where it stopped beneath Ducos’s gaze, was a General of cavalry. He was a youngish man, the very image of a French hero, whose gaudy uniform was stiffened to carry the weight of his medals. He leaped from his horse, waved the coachmen aside, and opened the carriage door and let down the steps with a flourish. He bowed.